Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to product classification. In particular, the present invention relates to techniques for automated product classification, product search, and product recommendation.
Background Art
The Internet has emerged as a powerful engine of commerce. Consumers increasingly turn to the Internet when they wish to purchase a product instead of visiting a brick-and-mortar store. To find a product, consumers will often visit a Web site of an online merchant, browse an online marketplace such as YAHOO!® Shopping, or use a search engine to search for a product or browse products by category.
When a consumer searches for a product online, the relevance of the results returned depend on how accurately the products have been categorized in an electronic commerce (aka “e-commerce”) catalog. When products are accurately categorized, the consumer is more likely to find high value results and to subsequently make an online purchase.
E-commerce products are often manually assigned to a category by the merchants who offer the products. The manual categorization of products takes time and is costly. The time and cost can make it difficult for a merchant to keep product classifications relevant and up to date when the classification taxonomy changes.
Systems of categorization can vary widely in the marketplace, causing problems for merchants who may need to change product categorizations for different purposes. For example, a merchant with a categorization system oriented towards end consumers might offer products from a supplier who uses a categorization system oriented towards wholesalers that does not make sense to the end consumer. Alternatively, an online merchant may wish to send a product feed to a feed aggregator that aggregates the products of multiple merchants in the same online marketplace. If the feed aggregator uses a different system of categories from the merchant, the merchant categorizations may be irrelevant to or incompatible with the marketplace. For these and many other reasons, a merchant may need to frequently update product categorizations in a product catalog to keep the categories consistent, relevant and useful to consumers and the marketplace.
In view of the foregoing, it may be deemed desirable to provide a system to automatically categorize products. Ideally, the desired system should enable products to be categorized in a manner that is faster, less expensive and more accurate than conventional solutions.